Artist Statement
My work arises from a condition of in-betweenness: between cultures, meanings, and temporal states. With roots in Japan and a life shaped by other Asian and Western cultures, I became attuned to subtle dissonances—where apparent familiarity conceals fundamental discontinuities. This in-betweenness shapes a practice that explores perceptual ambiguity and shifting meanings. Painting became a way to stay with that uncertainty, not to resolve it, but to live alongside it. It allows me to re-enter the questions that structure experience: How can presence arise from what is abstracted, unstable, or unseen? What can be held, and what inevitably slips away?
I work on absorbent papers using pigments, gouache, and ink to build layered, translucent atmospheres. Each painting evolves without pre-drawn structure, developing through intuitive washes, veiling, and interruption. White appears both as atmospheric veil and structural threshold, anchoring, revealing, or disrupting space. Forms such as gourds, goldfish, or glyphs may surface—not as fixed symbols, but as gestural thresholds where memory, abstraction, and existential inquiry converge. These elements suggest cultural reference yet dissolve into painterly rhythm, transformed through veiling, atmosphere, and layered becoming.
This process, which I call “art of a thousand times”, emerges from a continuous inquiry through painting, where each work becomes both question and re-engagement. My practice returns to impermanence, uncertainty, and the nature of perception, not to resolve them, but to remain with them. This recursive inquiry becomes visible through formal and gestural returns. Familiar marks, veils, or motifs may reappear, altered by context, rhythm, or time. These returns create an evolving visual vocabulary where each painting extends previous investigations. Contradictions often surface, presence and erasure, clarity and dissolution, stillness and motion, held not as opposites, but in suspended relation. The work accumulates slowly, through rhythm, attention, and becoming.
I aim to create contemplative spaces that remain open to perception, where meaning can shift, dissolve, or reappear over time. Each work becomes part of an ongoing meditation on questions that have no final answers, yet continue to shape how we understand presence, perception, and consciousness in an impermanent world.
